Thursday 14 June 2012

Anxiety, or not

11/06/12 14:23 [Monday]

I am on my way by train to see Dawn (near Doncaster) and on a service from Birmingham to Derby I noticed that I was mildly anxious. The basis of the anxiety was that instead of waiting at Birmingham New Street for a train right through to Doncaster I had boarded one to take me to Derby. This is allowed as I am travelling via ‘any permitted route’ as it says on the ticket - that is Birmingham - Derby - Sheffield - Doncaster - but I suppose I was slightly worried that I might have to explain myself (and there were several reasons conspiring together why I had got on that train at New Street). I was reminded of the occasion last summer when I conveyed a large kitchen bin from Kingswinford to Doncaster which Dawn’s daughter had bought on eBay. That time I was very anxious and noticed it more because I had not been accustomed to being anxious in recent years. The cause of my anxiety last summer was the Risperdal I was on at the higher dosage (37.5mg instead of presently 25mg).

Whereas animals experience emotions - fear, for example, and indeed anxiety, as well as a range of others - and come entirely under their grip, human beings are to a degree able to ‘disconnect’ emotions, that is stand outside them and take the awareness of the feelings as data to be processed. My belief is that people do this more to the degree their dopamine levels are high. High dopamine levels correspond to a lot of processing carrying on (and as part of it implicating the more frontal regions in the brain). Before I was on this Risperdal medication (which blocks dopamine) I did not experience any anxiety - this leading me into trouble such as getting stuck out of doors overnight as I was not at all guarded - or indeed any human emotions to speak of. Of course not everyone who is on Risperdal gets anxious: rather they are more in the grip of unintellectual emotions whichever of them it is in their personality to feel. I myself have it in my personality to experience anxiety - and before adolescence I did experience a lot - because my mental constitution makes me subject to a large intake of information whose processing - especially before adolescence and also if dopaminergic processing is undermined later in life - is an occasion for difficult uncertainty. High levels of dopamine which were too high for effective processing - around 2008-2011 my brain processes were swamped by dopamine - still secured me from anxiety by disconnecting me from ‘lower’ emotions so that in effect I was in a world of my own untroubled by the vagaries of everyone else’s world.

I am tempted to say that on the current dosage of Risperdal I have the balance right, that is I experience unintellectual emotions including anxiety but can stand aside from them and use the feeling as information for useful processing. This is proved by the experience I had on the train before Derby, of noticing I was anxious and comparing and contrasting that anxiety with the greater anxiety I had last summer.